For purposes of economic manufacture, most children's toy vehicles, such as those operated by pedals, are made with wheels formed of an inexpensive plastic such as polyethylene. As such, it is not possible to make a direct connection between the wheel and the traditional metallic pedal axle because the plastic wheel cannot support the axle in a driving relationship. Thus, typically a bushing made, for example, of nylon is insert-molded in the wheel to provide the support to drivingly receive the pedal axle. However, such an insert molding process is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, resulting in product which is more costly to manufacture than desirable. Moreover, because the nylon bushing is permanently molded into the polyethylene wheel, should there be a flaw in the final product such that it would be desirable to use its material only as scrap, unless the bushing is physically cut out of the wheel, which necessitates another manual procedure, the wheel cannot be ground up and the plastic reused because the polyethylene would be contaminated having the nylon interspersed therein.
Another problem with respect to prior art children's toy pedal driven vehicles is in the ability to provide a connection between the axle and the wheel so as to assure an efficient direct transfer of energy from the pedal to the wheel while at the same time rendering the vehicle easy to assemble. Of course, as is often the case with toy vehicles, assembly is accomplished by the user and thus it is imperative that ease of assembly be engineered into the product. In the past, however, those products which were desirably easy to assemble provided an inefficient transfer of energy from the pedal to the wheel.